Clearing the Decks

According to some loose but not completely unreliable calculations (x-refing my 'books I enjoyed' column on the right with the occasional Guardian review of books I didn't enjoy so much but liked well enough to finish) I read at least 56 books in the last year:

Over Seventy - P G Wodehouse

We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

The Voyage Out - Virginia Woolf

Solitude - Anthony Storr

Doppler - Erland Loe

Good Evening Mrs Craven - Mollie Panter Downes

The Sherlock Holmes omnibus

A small fat anthology of G K Chesterton

A Single Man - Christopher Isherwood

The Hot Gates - William Golding

The Murder Room - P D James

Dear Committee Members - Julie Schumacher

Dearest Andrew – letters from Vita Sackville West to long distance penpal Andrew Reiber

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark

Hotel Du Lac - Anita Brookner

The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor - Cameron McCabe (Ernest Borneman)

Christopher and Columbus - Elizabeth Von Arnim

More Work for the Undertaker - Margery Allingham

A Woman of No Importance - Oscar Wilde

Two Cheers for Democracy - E M Forster

A Wanderer in Venice - E V Lucas

The Fascination of London, The Kensington District - G E Mitton

Monday or Tuesday - Virginia Woolf

Tolkien's Gown - Rick Gekoski

Nice Work - David Lodge

Dear Reader – Paul Fournel (translation by David Bellos

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark

Six Against the Yard - The Detection Club (Allingham, Sayers and others)

In the Mountains - Elizabeth Von Arnim

Elizabeth in Rugen - Elizabeth Von Arnim

With a Zero at its Heart - Charles Lambert

The Provincial Lady (and sequels) - E M Delafield

Money, The Unauthorised Biography - Felix Martin

Curtain (Poirot's Last Case) - Agatha Christie

The Pale Horse – Agatha Christie

Nudge - Sunstein and Thaler

Satin Island - Tom McCarthy

A Spool of Blue Thread - Anne Tyler

Dead Man's Folly - Agatha Christie

Sleeping Murder - Agatha Christie

The Floating Admiral - Sayers, Christie, Chesterton and Others

The Finishing School – Muriel Spark

Taken At the Flood – Agatha Christie

Passages from the Autobiography of a Shakespeare Student - R M Theobald, M.A.

The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac - Eugene Field

The Blank Wall - Elizabeth Sanxay Holding

The Enchanted Places - Christopher Milne

Foxglove Summer - Ben Aaronovitch

The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie

The Gap in the Curtain - John Buchan

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

Spotted Hemlock – Gladys Mitchell

Quiet, the Power of Introverts in a World that Won’t Stop Talking – Susan Cain

Alarms and Diversions - James Thurber

A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James

Of the 56, 28 were by women, 26 by men and two were compilations with a mixed team. 19 were non fiction (which surprised me, I didn't think I read that much non-fiction) and 37 fiction. 

Last years resolution - to read more recently published works - went quite well, up from 4 to 7 (and if I finish 'The Fishermen' by midnight I'll have doubled up on last year, but I'm not going to dash through a book I'm enjoying just to say I completed it in 2015).

Most were of a pretty good standard (and the Booker nominees not as pretentious as I might have feared) but I have to fall in with everyone else in saying that A Brief History was the best book I read this year, and head and shoulders above the others shortlisted. A truly epic and complex novel written incredibly well. I won't be surprised if it crops up next to Dickens and co in the 'top hundred best ever' lists in a few years.

My favourite however - because it's not the same thing - was either Tolkien's Gown or A Gap in the Curtain.

So Happy New Year to anyone who might be following this blog - or who just stumbled across it - and I'll see you in 2016.

There is no reason for including this except I drew it.

Reading the Booker Shortlist

I'll probably jinx this now I'm posting about it but I'll be reading the Booker Shortlist this year. My cousin started the trend in 2014 and this time round, in my bid to read more contemporary books (and because I like the look of quite a few of them this year) I decided to join her.

Or possibly I guilted her into doing it again. The arrangements were made via email so it's hard to be clear.

I started with Satin Island by Tom McCarthy. This is what I think of (possibly wrongly) as solid Booker fodder, falling firmly into the realm of literary fiction.

Satin Island takes us inside the head of a character called U, an anthropologist trying to take in the whole of the tribe of modernity as his study, finding connections where perhaps they don't exist, drawing parallels between CEOs and high priests, oil spills and ink blots and cancer.

All of which is really enjoyable and novel at first, but he goes on doing it and he goes on doing it and by two thirds of the way you find you're hoping for it to either end or coalesce in some way, twine into itself and make sense. Not even necessarily in a grand unified theory of anything. Just in a small way would do, a minor insight or.. I don't know.

The endings not the best part, that's all.

A Spool of Blue Thread is much more straightforward. It's a family saga over three generations. The most recent written first, then back, then back, then forward again. This sounds confusing but actually makes perfect sense. As we go back we hear secrets that change our perception of the present, and of course this reflects how we truly understand families - especially our own - in reality. No-one gets a handbook or a 'story so far' when they're born. What they get is a group of people to grow into and love, learning their dynamics and their quirks and the metal they're made of. It's only as we grow up and grow older that we hear the history - some semi-secret, some not - that explains those quirks to us.

So A Spool of Blue Thread rings true. What I didn't think (and this may very well be a reflection of my own inverted snobbery) was that this was Booker material. I think of Booker material as meaningful, significant, different, a bit pseuds corner.

I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I don't think simply being extremely well-written and engaging is going to be enough.

In the meantime, on to the next..